Power Conditioners Recommendations

Ether, is your mind reeling yet? All good stuff on your thread. I'm an Audio Magic fan, and a Stealth Mini on your source would be wonderful. There are oodles of used PCs out there, but your deicated line is still a prudent and sound start. I paid $125, not counting the cost of my Porter Port. Obviously, from what you've read, this price may get pretty steep. Keep us posted on your electric journey.

I just tried a PS Audio Quintet in place of my Monster HTS 800, and although there was a slight improvement for the CD player, the LP's sounded horrible with the PS Audio - it took away a large portion of the soundstage, and had a very negative effect on instrumental timbres as well. I am sticking with the Monster - in my next house, I will probably have dedicated lines instead, as some have suggested here. I won't try a power conditioner for analog playback again, that's for sure.

The observations about conditioning and analog sound surprise me. I assume we're talking about turntables.

How does the power to a tt affect the sound? I thought it was only used to spin the table. Is it that conditioning makes the table spin at a more constant rate normally?

I was talking about analog. I have two dedicated lines (cost about $300 for both) and Furtech outlets. Both my vintage integrated and TT go into the Brickwall.

Dedicated lines do nothing to cleanse the dirty AC coming in from the street which is the biggest distortion pertaining to AC. Everybody has dirty AC (some worse than others) and it does not matter how close or far you are from a power station.

Dedicated lines serve two purposes:

1. Minimize any interior AC noise coming from appliances and dimmer switches.

2. Help ensure that there's enough juice for dynamic/complex passages for power hungry amps.

Dedicated lines also do not cure the bi-directional digital noise generated from digital source components (cdp, dac, class D amps, computer, etc). Even with dedicated lines the digital noise will go out from the component into the wall, all the way back to the service panel, and then out to every other circuit/line, and into your other components.

If you do not have a high-current drawing amplifier you can easily forgo dedicated lines all-together provided you have proper line conditioners in place and perhaps not be lacking in anything.

Be sure that the line conditioners you select have bi-directional filtering capabilities otherwise your digital components will continue to induce sonic harm into your other components (dedicated lines or not).

-IMO